SMA has been helping reunite and keep together families through different immigration processes since 2004. This includes bona fide marriages where one or both of the spouses lives outside the U.S., or where they are both in the U.S. It also includes U.S. citizens petitioning for their foreign parents, children or siblings. This does not include representing “anchor babies” and their families, simply because children born in the U.S. while becoming U.S. citizens based on their birth on American soil as set forth in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, cannot sponsor their foreign-born parents or relatives for any immigration benefits whatsoever.

President Trump began railing against the dangers of “anchor babies” and “chain migration” when he ran for President and he continues to use these terms incorrectly today. To clarify, while a child born in the U.S. is conferred automatic citizenship, this child cannot petition for any relatives until he or she becomes an adult, at the age of 21. This minimum age requirement serves the purpose of discouraging people from coming to the U.S. with a plan to have their children in the U.S. These children cannot, therefore, start a chain of legal migration at any time. In addition, it is important to note that Mr. Trump emphasizes that the preponderance of the parents who have their children are in the U.S. illegally, and the fact is that even when those U.S. citizen children turn 21, their parents are still ineligible to receive their green cards if they entered the U.S. illegally (known as “entry without inspection”, or “EWI”). Therefore, Mr. Trump’s entire diatribe is not only misinformed but based on pure fiction.

Now Mr. Trump’s next step is to attack this at the core by trying to end birthright citizenship that arises when a person is born in the U.S., but only in specific situations, such as when the child is born with foreign-born parents without legal status. He intends to do this by issuing an executive order, which will essentially mandate that the 14th Amendment of our sacred Constitution be ignored, and those exceptions be made to deny that birthright to a selected group of people, i.e. the babies born, allowing them to be penalized for the immigration status and the decisions made by their parents. A threat of an executive order which would serve to allow for the arbitrary application of a law that has stood for 150 years shows that the President does not care about facts, nor about the Constitution itself, but rather only his hate-filled goals of exclusion of all things foreign, including innocent babies.

SMA Law Firm has always assisted honest clients with positive intentions to realize their versions of the American Dream, and that includes many families whose children happened to be born in the U.S. We have never assisted people to enter the U.S. legally and we work within the legal parameters of the system to assist families in reuniting and in staying together, and this has never been done based on an “anchor baby” or “chain migration”, because that is simply not possible. If you want to clearly understand the law, please ask a qualified lawyer, and do not listen to the President, someone who not only does not respect the laws as written in our Bill of Rights and the Amendments to the Constitution and passed by Congress, but someone who misquotes them, and sidesteps them and abuses them to implement his plan of exclusion.

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